Um… Uh… Gum Eh? CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

Tin Can Luminary’s New Album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

CD Release Party in Garberville this Friday

This Friday, May 3 at the Hemp Connection in Garberville, I’ll debut my new album of Circuit-bent music titled Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

For younger readers, and others who might miss the rather obscure musical reference, the title and cover parody what is widely regarded as the worst (at least excluding the post-Roger dreck) Pink Floyd album, titled Ummagumma, a double album originally released in 1970.

A careful observer, or anyone with nothing better to do, can spot many parallels between Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma and my new album Um… Uh… Gum Eh? For instance:

Both albums contain a song about a guy who cuts people up with a sharp object:

Ummagumma has Careful With That Axe, Eugene

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Mr. Whisker.

Both albums include songs about outer space:

Ummagumma has Astronomy Domine

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Saucer People Speak

Both albums have songs about knowledgeable beings:

Ummagumma has The Grand Vizier’s Garden Party

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has The Orb of Omniscience

Both albums have long, spacy pieces where the only lyrics are “Oooh, Aaahh, and Ohhh”

Ummagumma has A Saucerful of Secrets

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Interzone Transit Authority

Both albums have collections of unrecognizable sounds, combined with spoken words:

Ummagumma has Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving With a Pict

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has I Made A Collage

Both albums have song titles that reference Greek mythology

Ummagumma has Sysyphus

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? has Sirens of Space, and here’s what it sounds like:

While Pink Floyd is famous for using gobs of state-of-the-art music equipment, I recorded Um… Uh… Gum Eh? With instruments I made out of tin cans, cigar boxes and second-hand childrens toys. That’s the state of my art, extremely low-budget and uniquely homemade. Even though Ummagumma is probably the worst Pink Floyd album, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is undoubtedly my best album to date.  Um… Uh… Gum Eh? is my seventh solo album, btw.

Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sound better than Pink Floyd at their worst? Yeah, I think so. Does Um… Uh… Gum Eh? Sound like Pink Floyd? Not really, but like Pink Floyd, Um… Uh… Gum Eh? sounds great when you are really high. It’s a trip!

Um… Uh… Gum Eh? will make you smile, take you on a tour of the cosmos and bring you to the brink of insanity, before safely returning you to Earth.  Here’s the first video single from Um… Uh… Gum Eh? titled: Falling

So come out to The Hemp Connection in Garberville

on Friday, May 3rd to hear more from Um… Uh… Gum Eh?, see and hear my homemade circuit-bent instruments, and to hear me play electric didgeridoo, for free, as part of Arts Alive.  Also on the bill will be Patchy Fogg, playing musical saw.

And Now… A Musical Interlude; Falling by Tin Can Luminary

And Now… A Musical Interlude

I’m proud to present the first video single from my upcoming album of circuit-bent music:

Falling

by

Amy Gustin: vocals

John Hardin: didgeridoo and circuit-bent toys

The working title for the album is:

Um… Uh… Gum Eh?

Not that anyone buys albums anymore, or cares at all about them, or even has an hour to kill to listen to one, but that’s still how I think about my music projects. If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that I’ve been working on this album of music made with hacked electronic toys,

and home-made electro-acoustic instruments,

for just about a year now.  It took me most of the summer to build the instruments,

and I spent most of the winter recording the music.

I hope to finish the entire project in perhaps a month.  In the mean time, I hope you enjoy this video single and share it with anyone you think might enjoy it.

What I Bent Over My Summer Vacation

What I Bent Over My Summer Vacation

circuit-bent synthesizer array

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ll remember that I went kind of gonzo about circuit-bending this past Spring. After about half a dozen posts, I realized that not many of my readers could relate to my interest in rewiring children’s electronic toys. So, I dumbed down my posts to encourage the idiots among you to keep reading, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve lost interest in making music with creatively modified, cast-off electronic toys.

Quite the contrary, over the summer I created a number of circuit-bent instruments from electronic toys I found in our local thrift stores. While not every toy I bent, worked out as well as I hoped, enough of them survived surgery that I now have an array of amusing looking, capable, and unique sounding of synthesizers at my disposal.

While most electronic toys designed for children are nearly bullet-proof, they all share one weakness. One substance has probably stopped more electronic toys from ever working again than any other. This substance corrupts them from the inside, like kryptonite does to Superman. That substance is pee.

According to my extensive research, fully half of all electronic toys found in thrift stores, contain pee. Sure, they’ve cleaned the toy off. You can’t see any pee on it, but set it down in front of your dog or cat. They’ll let you know. Of course, when you open the toy, you’ll find it. Usually, it leaks through the keyboard, or the buttons, and directly onto the little membrane switches beneath them. This causes keys not to play, and functions not to work. Sometimes you can fix these problems with a thorough cleaning, sometimes not.

The worst case pee scenario happens when pee gets all over the main circuit board. Such was the case with my beloved Bratz drum bra. The cups of the bra channeled cat pee directly onto the main circuit board where it dried to an oily, foul smelling film and proceeded to corrode everything. Despite that, the device continued to work, at least long enough for me to add a pitch bend control and a line out, which actually made it into a great sounding instrument. Since then, however, it works only intermittently.

Now that the sun has disappeared behind the hillside, leaving my photovoltaic panels unkissed by sunlight until next March, and thus bringing my summer soldering season to an end, I’ve begun exploring the musical potential I’ve unleashed in these newly altered devices. Allow me to introduce you to a couple of them:

Introducing; My Circuit-Bent Casio ML1

 

This amazing little instrument pleases me greatly. Stock, it actually makes some pretty good sounds, including a decent imitation of a piano, and it still works as originally intended. However I’ve added a matrix of touch sensors which allow me to directly stimulate the electronic “brain” of the ML1, releasing its previously untapped potential for composing original music of apparently infinite variety. I enjoy collaborating with the ML1, a relatively young composer, and very much a product of the digital age. As a composer, the ML1 speaks to the age in which we live.

I titled our first collaboration 13 Minutes at the End of Time. The modified ML1 generated every note, phrase, rhythm and noise heard in this piece. My input came only in the form of touching the sensors that I added. Touching any two of these sensors at the same time, creates a new connection within the ML1′s electronic “brain”, causing it to “think outside the box” with surprising originality.

Like many young composers, the modified ML1 favors quick tempos and complex poly-rhythms, but it balances them with subtle textures and sustained notes that float serenely over the fray. I think this piece reflects the relentless sensory overload and chaos of our wired lifestyle. At 13 minutes, it runs a little longer than the typical modern attention span, but some of us still know how to listen. 13 Minutes at the End of Time also provides the perfect ambiance to induce stress into any situation.

Pretty in Pink

 

I found this pink “girly” toy keyboard at a thrift store around here. Although it had a few splashes of pee inside it, it cleaned up easily with no damage to the electronics. This toy says “Starring Me” on the front, but it looks identical to this “Barbie” toy keyboard bent by Bogus Noise UK, and immortalized in this video. I presume I have the generic version of the same toy.

I took a different approach to this toy than did the braceletted British bender who bent the bejeezus out of that Barbie brand Bontempi. I started with the ubiquitous pitch-bend mod. This is one of the easiest, and most universal bends that you can make on an electronic toy, especially the cheap ones.

Almost all of theses little noise-making electronic toys, use a single resistor to set the speed of the central processor. If you change the resistance of that resistor, you can make the whole machine operate faster or slower, which in turn, raises or lowers the pitch of all the noises it makes. You will usually find this resistor located right next to the black blob in the center of the circuit board, often labeled “R1”.

If you touch this resistor at both ends, the toy will usually go up or down in pitch dramatically, or stop working all together. If you replace that resistor with a potentiometer, you can use that potentiometer to sweep the pitch of the sounds up or down. This opens up a lot of new potential sounds for you to exploit.

In this pink girly keyboard, I used one of the purple ornamental flowers as the knob to adjust the pitch. The three switches on the lower left, allow me to switch even more resistance into the circuit, which allows me to play the keyboard in four distinct registers, with the pitch-bend knob active in all of them. This four-speed pitch-bend mod extends the toys range by nearly an octave above, and several octaves below, it’s original voice.

I made one other major modification to the sound of this pink girly keyboard. I added a passive ring modulator. A passive ring modulator adds a very weird kind of distortion, and it allows you to use another signal to change the harmonic profile of that distortion in very strange ways. Q Reed Ghazala shared this schematic of a passive ring modulator on his Anti-Theory website.

It looked pretty simple to me, consisting of two transformers and four diodes. Even I could handle that. For the secondary, or “Y” signal, (that modifies the original or “X” signal) I built an analog square-wave oscillator from an 8-pin “555” chip, relying on the instructions I found in the Crème DeMentia “Bending Buddy” comic book. Everyone interested in circuit-bending should check out the Crème Dementia kits and comics.

Both circuits fit easily on a 2” square piece of circuit-board, and inside the toy. The “Y” oscillator has an independent on/off switch with an indicator LED, and a pitch control knob. Another knob blends the “Y” oscillator with the “X” signal. You can see the switch and indicator light between the two purple flowers on the upper right, and the control knobs located to the immediate right of the keyboard.

I displaced one of the ornamental purple flowers to make space for a quarter inch phone jack that serves as a line-level output, but I re-purposed the flower as the pitch-control knob. I added three tiny LEDs to the handle, to make my new instrument extra pretty, an amber one in the center, flanked by two red ones, because I had them lying around. The red ones came out of a small power inverter that burned out, and the amber one came from a disposable led tea light, with a dead battery.

How does it sound? Th passive ring modulator give this toy a very biting and aggressive sound, reminiscent of a an old Farfisa organ through a fuzz box. The analog oscillator feeding the “Y” oscillator dramatically alters the harmonic character of the sound in real time, with a twist of a knob, not unlike an analog synthesizer, and imparts an authentically analog Theremin-like sound on it’s own.

I composed this rather abstract, obtuse, but somehow endearing piece entirely with the newly modified pink girly toy keyboard. It reminds me of some of the electronic music popular in sci-fi movies of the sixties.

As you can see my enthusiasm for circuit-bending has not waned.  I hope at least a few of you enjoyed this look at a couple of my new instruments. I built these instruments to force me to think about music in different ways, and I hope this approach will lead to some interesting and hopefully compelling music in the coming months.  Stay tuned.

Barbie v Bratz

Barbie v Bratz

 

For a middle-aged guy, I spend a lot of time prowling the toy section of our local thrift stores. As you can imagine, “Barbie”, the Grand Dame of Mattel’s gigantic toy empire, remains a ubiquitous presence in the racks of pre-abused toys I regularly survey. The last time I visited the thrift store in the Manilla Community Ctr, I found a a clear plastic shoebox full of naked Barbie dolls. They must have had at least 30 naked Barbie dolls in that box.

 

Of course, that many Barbie dolls would not fit in a shoebox if they were all facing the same way. Sure, you could fit 30 pairs of Barbie doll feet in at one end of the box, but the boobs of thirty Barbie dolls would surely topple over, and spill out at the other end of the box. So, to fit them all in the box, these Barbies were stacked head-to-toe in a kind of multiple 69 configuration. I’m not sure whether it looked more like a big-haired lesbian orgy, or an all-blonde mass grave, but lets just say that the image of that shoebox full of naked Barbies has stayed with me, perhaps a bit longer than I’d like.

I’ve always found Barbie a bit disturbing. I’ve seen “Superstar; The Karen Carpenter Story”, and I’ve seen some amusing, if not inspiring dioramas, starring Barbie, assembled by an artist with a dark sense of humor, but, I’ve never seen Barbie dolls look quite so disquieting, as they did in that shoebox a few weeks ago at the Manilla Community Ctr. Thrift Store. I don’t think that’s a great way to sell Barbie dolls, personally, but whatever. What’s done is done. I guess I’ll shake it off someday.

 

That’s how it is with Barbie. I can’t say she’s unattractive, but everything about her is just a little creepy. Besides the fact that her boobs are too hard and pointy, there’s something just a little psychotic in her facial expression. She’s trying too hard. Barbie always looks phony, and just a little too ambitious. It’s not a good kind of ambition, if there is such a thing.

 

Barbie’s expression says “I know I’m beautiful, and I like to go on dates, but I’m in love with Jesus, and I’m saving myself for marriage.” Or, that she’s a perpetual beauty pageant contestant, trying desperately to convince us that she’s perfect, until that day she killed 14 people in a Starbucks in San Diego. You can see it in her eyes, she’s looking right at you, but doesn’t see you at all. She’s in her own little world, totally focused on trying to live up to her own unrealistic expectations of herself. Who wants to spend their time around that? Not me.

 

I understand that Barbie was originally marketed to middle-aged men of questionable taste, such as myself. Apparently, Barbie dolls, then called “Lili” dolls, clad in only a negligee, became a popular item, sold in bars in Germany in the 50s. Named after a sexy, sassy, buxom young female comic strip character of the same name, “Lili” dolls hung from rear-view mirrors all over Europe. The 50′s era design explains Barbie’s pointy, 18hr, cross-your-heart bra, missile tits, but I still don’t like her.

Original Lili doll

Yes, Mattel really hit pay-dirt when they started marketing this sexy plaything to young girls. You can’t argue with success. My survey of Humboldt thrift stores tells me that Barbie has achieved complete market saturation. If there is a little girl in America who does not have a Barbie, its only because her mom forbade her from having a Barbie. As a result, she will grow up obsessed with Barbies and collect them compulsively.

I’m sure lots of little girls grow up without playing with Barbie dolls, but at least they always knew that Barbie was available to them. Hell, I even played with Barbie, once or twice myself. I seem to vaguely recall helping Barbie drive her Corvette over a cliff at some point in my distant past, and I still want one of those new “Video Barbies”. Have you seen “Video Barbie”?

 

Video Barbie has a video camera in her neck, a TV screen in her back, and a serial port between her legs, so you can upload the video you shoot with Barbie to youtube and facebook with your computer. I’ve made enough documentaries to know that very few people ever get entirely comfortable in front of a video camera. I’m not sure they’d be any more comfortable with a middle-aged man pointing a Barbie doll with a tracheotomy at them, but its worth a shot.

 

That pretty much sums up how I feel about Barbie, but the Bratz dolls are another story all together. I like the Bratz. I really like the Bratz. I mean, I know they are too young for me, and I don’t, like, know their names or anything, but I think they are cute, and not in a fluffy kitty sort of way.

 

Bratz dolls never fail to turn me on. The Bratz dolls aren’t as stacked as Barbie, but they have cute figures, and they like to show off their belly buttons. I don’t think Barbie even has a belly button, but what really gets me about the Bratz dolls, is the way they look at me.

 

I can’t help notice them looking at me. They’re eyes are at least three times as big as their boobs, and they look at me the way real women never do, at least not when I’m rifling through a shelf of stuffed animals at a thrift store. Then I notice the Bratz luscious full pouting lips, almost as wide as their own hips, and I can’t help but think to myself, “I’ll bet these Bratz give memorable Bjs.”

 

So, when I found out that Barbie was suing the Bratz for copyright infringement, I immediately sided with the Bratz. The lawsuit seemed ridiculous to me. Bratz look nothing like Barbie. The Bratz are so much hotter than Barbie, so much cooler than Barbie and so much more appealing than Barbie. How could that bitch even think they were copying her? “She’s just jealous.” I thought.

 

I was shocked and heartbroken when the ruling came down and Barbie won the trial. Apparently, Barbie, or more accurately, Mattel, spent big bucks on the research and development of the Bratz, but because Mattel determined that Bratz dolls were only going to hurt sales of Barbie dolls, Mattel shelved the Bratz project. A Mattel employee, Carter Bryant, who worked on the Bratz project, and obviously became as smitten with them as I am, jumped ship, and started his own toy company, MGA Entertainment, launching the Bratz himself, and going head-to-head with Mattel in the super-sexy teenage doll market. That’s how the Bratz were born, and that’s how the Bratz almost died.

 

After the trial, the judge ordered that all Bratz dolls and toys be removed from store shelves. That didn’t effect thrift stores though. I continued to encounter Bratz in the thrift stores pretty regularly. By the time of the trial, literally billions of units of cheap plastic Bratz crap had spread to every corner of the globe. I know that globes don’t literally have corners, but suffice it to say that enough Bratz products had been manufactured by that point to form a distinct layer of Bratz sediment in the Earths fossil record.

 

When I would see Bratz dolls in the thrift stores during that time, they reminded me of just how corrupt our criminal justice system really is. Leonard Peltier and Mumia Abdul Jamal are still in prison, the drug war continues unabated, and now this. The Bratz became a symbol of injustice and oppression to me. That flawed ruling only made me love the Bratz that much more.

 

Even so, I never wanted to own any of the Bratz dolls. I’m not that kind of guy. I like the way they look, and I like the way they look at me, but I’m not the possessive type. I just like that they are around, and its nice to see them at the thrift store once in a while. I’m not a collector, and I didn’t try to make money off of people’s fond memories of them, as Bratz dolls became more scarce over time. So, I cheered when an appeals court overturned the trial verdict, and ordered Barbie to pay the Bratz $310 million. Last I heard, Bratz had taken 40% of the “fashion doll market” away from Barbie. Woo-hoo!

 

Now, I hope the Bratz crush Barbie once and for all, and if there’s a god in heaven, please don’t ever let me see another shoebox full of naked Barbies ever again. I know that this whole Barbie vs Bratz thing blew over last year, so this is by no means news. I’m excited about the Bratz today because I just bought my very first Bratz electronic toy.

 

I found this Bratz brand, pink and black electronic drum machine, that looks like a giant padded training bra, in the Garberville thrift store for $1. Looking online, couldn’t find any evidence that anyone else has ever circuit-bent this model of toy before, and I could only find one picture of it online, in an Ebay auction, used, for $9.99. I’m eager to explore the untapped potential of this sexy, somewhat rare, Bratz padded drum bra, and I look forward to having the Bratz in my growing circuit-bent orchestra soon.

For sale on Ebay, $9.99

Postscript: Having spent a while looking at pictures of the Bratz in preparation of this post. I have to admit that these mantis faced Bratz creep me out every bit as much as Barbie. I think I may need to see a fashion doll trauma counselor, but I still like my new drum bra.

The Return of Circuit Bending

The Return of Circuit Bending

So I didn’t tell you about our circuit bending workshop. I mean, I told you it was coming, plenty of times, but I didn’t tell you how it went. Well, it went swimmingly! We had a great turnout, more than I expected. My only regret was that with so many people in the workshop, building kits took the entire time, and CMKT4 didn’t get a chance to play.

CMKT4, who gave up their only day off on their 30 day West Coast tour, to do this workshop in G,ville, told me that our event turned out to be their highest grossing workshop on the entire tour. They had a great time at the event as well, and look forward to returning to Garberville soon. Next time, we’ll get started earlier and go later.

I had a terrific time! I met some cool new people, got to know some people I already knew better, and got to introduce some of my Ham friends to some of my music friends. I also got to stalk our local thrift stores with CMKT4 and ask some circuit bending questions of someone who knows their way around the insides of a Casio mini-keyboard.

I also got to build this spiffy cigar box drum machine. I love the sound. It reminds me of 50s sci-fi movies.

 

The box contains three piezoelectric contact microphones (probably overkill). The underside has three different sized expansion springs for reverb. Above board you can see a collection of soft drink lids, beer bottle caps, finger cymbals, a small brass bell, five different sized compression springs and two small wire chimes surgically removed from little plush toys.

I grabbed one of those little PAIA two transistor oscillator kits that SHARC was giving away at the event,

took it home and built this little light-controlled, Theremin-like instrument. I housed the project in a burned out solar yard light.

 

Since this oscillator runs on only one and a half volts, the single AAA battery holder in the yard light provided the power solution. I removed the LED, circuit board and solar panel from the lamp, replacing them with the oscillator circuit card and five photo-resistors wired in series, routing various wires through the hole that originally accommodated the LED. I found a speaker that fit perfectly into an old spray paint can lid, and mounted it to the bottom of the lamp with aluminum angle brackets I cut from an aluminum can. I mounted a momentary action switch, and an output jack in the lamp flange. The switch turns the oscillator on and off, the amount of light coming in the top controls the pitch.

I really hope everyone else who participated in the event had as much fun as I did. I hope CMKT4 will return to Garberville as soon as this Fall and we can have another circuit-bending event, and next time we’ll have some music, maybe including some local circuit-benders.

CMKT4 to Lead Circuit-Bending Workshop/Concert in Garberville

This press release went out to all of our local papers last week:

CMKT4 to Lead Circuit-Bending Workshop/Concert in Garberville

On Monday, May 21, 2012, the Southern Humboldt Amateur Radio Club or SHARC, presents a circuit-bending workshop led by the Dekalb, Ill based circuit-bending band, CMKT4. The event begins at 5pm with a potluck dinner, and the workshop will start at 6pm. Circuit-bending, a term coined by Q Reed Ghazala in the 1980′s refers to the art of rewiring battery powered electronic devices to exploit their hidden potential. Since then, circuit-bending has grown into a musical movement.

The workshop teaches skills like soldering, wiring, and creative re-purposing, and encourages everyone to experiment, and have fun with electronics. Each participant will build a CMKT4 contact microphone that can be used as a high quality acoustic instrument pickup, or to turn nearly nearly any object into an electrified musical instrument.

The cost of the workshop is $15 and includes all of the parts, a comic book instruction manual, use of all necessary tools and supplies, and expert instruction. CMKT4 will also perform a set of original circuit-bent music to conclude the event.

Circuit-bending is a great way to learn about electronics while having fun. The Southern Humboldt Amateur Radio Club encourages everyone to explore and enjoy electronics safely. Ham radio is a great way to learn more about electronics, and to meet others who share that interest. Call Jack Foster at 923-3700 for more information about this event.